Elder Jackson Beach: Mow to the End

Hey y'all, another week has come and gone, as well as another transfer. Elder Erickson is headed home this week, and I'll be receiving a new companion tomorrow. Not sure who that is going to be yet, but I'm staying in Tuscaloosa for my last transfer, which I am happy about.

I said last week that we had several appointments with people that we had met tracting. We had a bit of unfortunate luck with that. Most of our appointments (four of them) were scheduled for Saturday afternoon. On Thursday evening we got a call from President asking us to come up to Hoover for Elder Erickson's exit interview on Saturday, so all four of our appointments on Saturday were missed because of that. On Sunday we stopped by all of them again, and only had a little bit of luck there. Two of them weren't home, so nothing happened there. One of them was home, and we were able to reschedule for Monday. His name is Greg, and he seemed pretty excited to meet with us so we were happy about that and hopeful for our Monday appointment. We went by on Monday and nobody was home. As we were leaving to head back to our bikes, we saw a car pull up in the driveway at his house that we had just left. So we went back and tried knocking again, but still nobody answered. We really wanted to meet with Greg, but it never happened this week. At our fourth house that we followed up at, we didn't see the guy who we had met before because his dad answered. He said that his son (who had asked us to come back) didn't actually live there. When we asked if we could share our message about the Savior with him anyway, he told us that he "had already heard the message" and that he was a Pastor at a church in town. I said something like, "So you have already heard about how the heavens are not closed, and that God has restored His gospel through a living prophet?" I don't remember exactly what he said, but he basically made it clear that he had already heard everything that we had to share and he wasn't interested in hearing it again. Bummer. So basically we kinda got wrecked on all of our appointments on Saturday. We are still hopeful that we'll see Greg in the future, and he seems like he has potential to be solid.

Well, it's been a little weird getting ready for Elder Erickson to go home this week knowing that that's going to be me in six weeks. There are definitely things that I love about the mission that I'm not looking forward to leaving because of. I love being able to spend all of my time focused on one thing with minimal distractions. And that one thing is the most important thing I could be doing - bringing others unto Christ. I look forward to spending these last six weeks doing all I can to make the Lord proud. In Dad's words, I'm going to "mow to the end of the lawn." I know that one of the greatest phrases we could ever hear is the one that the Lord will say to us when we have done all we can: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of the Lord." Those are words that I want to hear someday. Those are words that we can all hear someday. It's up to us to make it happen.

I told my Mom this week that the trunkiest thing about me is that I'm kind of sick of writing emails haha, so sorry if this one was a little shorter or less informative than usual. Just know that I love y'all, pray for y'all, that I love and have a testimony of our Savior and His restored gospel, and that I love representing Him here in Alabama. There's no greater thing I could be doing.

Have a great week!

Elder Beach
#RollTide